Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Associated Press
PITTSBURGH
The Heinz Endowment is looking for a new home for some of its Marcellus Shale gas research programs at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Healthy Environments and Communities, endowment officials told The Associated Press.
Among the programs is FracTracker, an online resource that examines environmental issues around drilling, as well as new ways to manage citizen advocacy programs. Other programs include technical support for citizen water-monitoring and air-monitoring and the documentation of the effects of the shale operations on people living nearby.
“We’re exploring a whole bunch of different options,” said Caren Glotfelty, director of the Heinz environment program. “We’ve got a lot of conversations going.”
Glotfelty said Heinz is committed to FracTracker.
“It’s really, really important for us that this tool function even better than it has in the past,” she said, adding that might mean dividing parts of the research and outreach work among different groups or institutions.
The endowment board will vote on the issue in October.
News of the split first appeared in the Pittsburgh City Paper.
Glotfelty said Heinz came to the decision after “watching the comfort level of the graduate school around the amount of community outreach” that goes with FracTracker.
In a related development, Allison Schlessinger, a spokeswoman for Pitt’s School of Health Sciences, told The AP that Bernard Goldstein, the interim director of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities, has resigned, just a few months after the resignation of professor Conrad Volz.
Volz, who resigned in April, was a critic of the natural gas industry and claimed its drilling operations were contaminating drinking water.
Goldstein, the former dean of Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, said Heinz’s decision was a factor in his resignation, but not the only one. He said he had already planned on retiring from teaching at the end of September.
“I took this on the basis of a short-term thing,” he said of the job.
Goldstein acknowledged that Pitt may not have been the right long-term fit for FracTracker.
“My point is, in academia we’re really much better at developing things. Our strength is not in maintaining things over the long term,” he said. “It was clearly something that Heinz was less willing to have us do.”
Goldstein has also spoken out about Marcellus gas drilling, publishing op-eds on the issue in local papers. “I don’t understand why we’re rushing ahead so quickly” with drilling before a scientific consensus is established on the possible health effects, he said.
Energy companies have identified major reserves of natural gas throughout the Marcellus Shale, a formation that lies under much of New York and Pennsylvania, and parts of Maryland, Ohio and West Virginia.
Drilling in the shale has raised concerns about the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which injects chemical-laced water to break up the shale and allow natural gas to escape.
Environmental groups and the Environmental Protection Agency have expressed concerns about how the process affects water, soil and air quality. The industry insists it is safe.
Schlessinger said Pitt and CHEC will continue to research natural gas and its impacts on public health.
“We do not stop people from advocating a position. But we have to err on the side of fact-based, evidence based science,” Schlessinger said. But “I’m not sure where the funding is going to come from.”
Schlessinger said Bruce Pitt, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, will be CHEC’s new interim director.